Southwest Tour
Development to the southwest of Chicago was dominated by a transportation corridor which connected Lake Michigan with the Mississippi River system. Before 1848, this connection was made overland and through the Chicago Portage. After 1848, the Illinois and Michigan Canal linked the South Branch of the Chicago River with the Illinois River. By 1854, the original canal was joined by a railroad line. At the opening of the twentieth century, the Sanitary and Ship Canal reinvigorated water travel along the corridor, and the construction of the Stevenson Expressway in the early 1960s provided another form of transportation in this old corridor.
Transportation in and out of Chicago also followed a shallower corridor to the north of the canals. The Southwest Plank Road (now Ogden Avenue, Route 34) paralleled the canal to the Des Plaines River, but then continued westward as the canal corridor headed southward. Our tour will follow the more westerly route out from the city center and then return into the city along the more southerly route.
We might expect that settlement in this corridor would be oriented toward trade and industry, and to a large degree that is the case. Interestingly, residential commuter suburbs, farms, and recreational sites also took advantage of the geography southwest of downtown Chicago to create a diverse mixture of settlements in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The Union Stock Yards Gate (SW1) (1879), off Halsted at Exchange Avenue, is a reminder that the Stock Yards District operated here from 1865 until 1971. Large districts devoted to industrial enterprises also located at West Chicago, Harvey, South Chicago, Lawndale, Cicero, Hammond, Chicago Heights, Waukegan, and Joliet. Very little remains of these districts, which have been redeveloped with light industry and warehouses or stand empty once again.
While the stockyards have disappeared, the neighborhoods which surrounded them remain. The housing, parks, businesses, and churches now serve residents who work across the region. In Back of the Yards, St. Joseph Roman Catholic Church (SW2) is one of three churches between 4600 and 5000 South Hermitage founded by Roman Catholic immigrants from Bohemia, Lithuania, and Poland. Polish immigrants organized St. Joseph in 1886. Architect Joseph Molitor designed the present church, completed in 1914.
This tour continues by traveling north to 47th Street and west to Cicero. Near Cermak Road stand remnants of the once extensive Hawthorne Works (SW3) of Western Electric. Relocated from the near west side in 1903, the five and six story red brick buildings have distinctive terra cotta trim visible behind the strip malls on the east side of Cicero.
West on Ogden Avenue (U.S. 34), and then south on Harlem Avenue (SR 43) in the Portage Woods to the west (Forest Preserve District of Cook County), stands a monument to this earlier era: the Chicago Portage National Historic Site (SW4). The historic site was established in 1952, and the large steel sculpture at the site was later installed to commemorate the three hundredth anniversary of the 1673 trip by Father Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet through the region. The sculpture shows the two Frenchmen with an unidentified Indian (who quite probably was leading the two strangers as well as providing the physical labor exemplified in this sculpture). The Des Plaines River is just to the west of this site, and footpaths leading off from the site give a glimmer of what the landscape might have looked like three hundred years ago.
Returning north along Harlem and then west on Ogden Avenue, we cross the Des Plaines River and drive through more forest preserve lands. Since the mid-nineteenth century, beer gardens and picnic groves have dotted these woods, close to Ogden and Archer avenues, as well as at the start of Joliet and Plainfield roads that angle out further southwest. On the left, the Cream City Amusement Park front gate stood in the first decades of the twentieth century. North a short block off Ogden Avenue at Barry Point Road is the Hoffman Tower (SW5). George Hoffman’s family had a beer garden and brewery here for decades before he built this tower in 1908 as a further attraction. Visitors could rent boats, climb the tower, or enjoy the view.
Just across the bridge north from Hoffman’s operation is Riverside, established in 1869 as an elite residential enclave. Following the curvilinear streets northward (on a path designed by the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted), we pass large, single-family houses on spacious lots built primarily between the 1870s and the 1920s. The families who built these residences enjoyed the scenic beauty of the site, but also shared it with visitors to entertainment venues like George Hoffman’s across the river. The plan of Riverside centers on a rail station, which provided ready commuter access. Across the tracks is the Riverside Water Tower (SW6), which made it possible for Riverside families to have indoor plumbing long before many of their neighbors.
Returning south to Ogden Avenue, which runs roughly parallel to the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad, head west to Maple Street. North on Maple Street, beyond the tracks is the Grossdale Train Station (SW7)—which was the original name of this commuter suburb founded by S. E. Gross in 1889. With smaller lots and fewer amenities than Riverside, Grossdale attracted a less affluent population as it grew along the railroad. The original train station has been moved across the street from the railroad and serves the Brookfield Historical Society.
Ogden Avenue (U.S. 34) continues to skirt a string of railroad suburbs that emerged during the 1860s and 1870s: La Grange, Western Springs, and then Hinsdale, whose train station is south of Ogden Avenue at York Road. The original plat of Hinsdale was commissioned in 1864, just after the railroad came through this area. Several additions to this original plat left nineteenth-century Hinsdale with a wide range of lot sizes—to accommodate large mansions or modest worker cottages. Growth in Hinsdale was slow and steady, and skilled German workers were kept busy building houses for decades. Many lived in modest houses in the original Hinsdale subdivision and supported the construction of the Immanuel Evangelical Church (SW8) (1900) on Grant Street a few blocks southwest of the train station.
West along Ogden Avenue (U.S. 34) through Downers Grove (which has its historical society in a restored nineteenth-century house off Main Street and into Lisle), is the original site of the Beaubien Tavern (SW9) (on the north side of Ogden just east of Karns Road). The tavern was dragged east on Ogden to Park Street and south on Park to a site adjacent to the Lisle Train Station (just east of SR 53) in the late 1980s. Restoration over the 1990s confirmed that the structure dates to the early 1830s and served as a tavern both before and after Mark Beaubien, Jr., bought the property in 1843. As with other taverns in the region, it lost out to the railroad by the 1860s. Perhaps nowhere is this point made more strongly in the landscape than at Lisle, where the Beaubien Tavern now stands across the street from the Lisle Depot Museum, which served area farmers as a shipment point beginning in the 1870s.
Traveling south to Maple Avenue, drive west a few miles to Naperville (Maple Avenue becomes Chicago Avenue in Naperville). Naperville began as a settlement along the west branch of the DuPage River in 1831. It is a town which grew first because of its proximity to the plank road (now Ogden Avenue) and to the west branch of the DuPage River. In 1834, George Laird constructed the Pre-Emption House (SW10), a replica of which stands as the visitors’ center of Naper Settlement just south of Chicago Avenue at Main Street. Other nineteenth-century buildings have been dragged onto the settlement grounds from around Naperville, including the Murray house built in the 1840s. Together they comprise the largest collection of preserved nineteenth-century structures in the region.
In the 1830s and 1840s, Naperville grew as the DuPage County seat along a key route (Ogden Avenue) out from Chicago. Unlike northern neighbor Warren Wheaton, Naperville residents failed to understand that the railroad would change the logic of regional development. But Naperville got a second chance, and its own rail stop, when the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad came through the area in the early 1860s. Returning east on Chicago Avenue and then north on Brainard, we come to North Central College, which moved to Naperville from Plainfield in 1871 because of the new rail connection. With the support of local German Evangelicals, architect John M. Van Osdel designed a large limestone building for the college in 1871, Old Main (SW11). Nearby quarries, breweries, and a furniture factory also provided local employment into the mid-twentieth century.
The next stop moves the tour south into the Canal Corridor. Take Chicago (Maple) east to SR 53 and then south through Romeoville and past Stateville Prison. Travel east on Bridge Street across the waterways and then north on Collins Street.
On the north side of Joliet on Collins Street off Columbia, in sight of the Old State Prison, are the remains of the Joliet Iron Works (SW12). Visitors can walk an interpretive path maintained by the Forest Preserve District of Will County, which weaves through the remains of the steel operations which closed in 1980.
Following SR 171 northward we come to Lockport, which was designated as the headquarters for construction of the Illinois and Michigan Canal. The canal commissioners’ house (1836) just north of SR 7, is a low, white frame structure just off Archer Avenue. Just behind the canal commissioners’ headquarters on 8th Avenue stands the Gaylord Building (SW13), a substantial limestone structure completed in 1838 as a storehouse for the canal. Today, the building includes an exhibit on the evolution of Lockport and surrounding towns. Just outside the front entrance to the Gaylord Building, we can see what remains of the Illinois and Michigan Canal, which operated from 1848 until traffic all but ceased in 1914. Up the hill are several churches which date back to the era of canal construction.
North along SR 171 (now Archer Avenue) and west on 135th Street in Romeoville is Isle à la Cache (SW14), an island museum dedicated to the French fur trade and operated by the Forest Preserve District of Will County. Continuing to the northeast along Archer Avenue (and 106th Street), we see St. James at Sag Roman Catholic Church (SW15), which sits on a high bluff. The small limestone church and cemetery was built by Irish canal workers and contractors in 1852. Around it in the Cook County Forest Preserves are sloughs and wetlands which have remained undeveloped.
Traveling southwest along the canal corridor, we have seen examples of every basic kind of settlement in nineteenth-century Chicagoland: farm, industrial, recreational, and commuter. The complexity of nineteenth-century settlement is clear, even though much of this landscape was radically transformed by the hypersuburbanization of the late twentieth century.